On Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:50:18 -0700, listmail wrote
On Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:58:15 -0700 (PDT), Mark Pryor wrote
--- On Sat, 7/19/08, listmail listmail@entertech.com wrote:
From: listmail listmail@entertech.com Subject: [CentOS] Load Average ~0.40 when idle To: "CentOS mailing list" centos@centos.org Date: Saturday, July 19, 2008, 1:48 PM I am running CentOS 5 on a dual-dual-core Intel machine, and I am seeing a load average of between 0.35 and 0.50 while the machine is idle, i.e. no processes appear to be running.
Both top and uptime report the same thing. Looking at top, I cannot see any processes that are using CPU time except for top and init, and they are not using enough cycles to push up the load average.
According to top, there are occasional tiny (like 0.5%) bumps in the system usage occasionally, and almost no user space usage. Again, not enough to account for the load average I am seeing.
I have tried a couple of kernel updates, and upgraded from CentOS 5.0 to 5.2, none of which make any difference.
Has anyone else seen this? And can anyone recommend a way to figure out what is causing the load average to be this high when the machine is idle?
I have not seen this with any C5. However I have moved all /etc/cron.daily/prelink /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis
to the weekly.
check /var/log/secure for dictionary attacks
check your /var/log/httpd/access_log for unusual PHP activity
check http://localhost/usage for the webalizer logs, where maybe something will standout.
Thanks, Mark. I have done all of that. There was a dictionary attack a few days ago, but there is no activity now. Since this is a new machine that I am just burning in, I am tempted to reinstall from scratch in case the machine somehow got hacked during burn-in. I don't see any stuck processes, or any other clues. I have an identical machine running a slightly older version of the kernel (CentOS 5.0 - 2.6.18.53.1.14.el5) that does not exhibit this problem, so I am a bit suspicious. Has anyone else noticed anything like this?
Replying to my own post as a follow-up. I just checked another machine that I am burning in with CentOS 5.2, and it has the same problem: load average ~0.4 when idle. Both of these machines have Supermicro X7DBN motherboards, but one is running a single quad-core CPU (Intel Xeon) and the other is running two dual-core CPUs (Intel Xeon). Anyone else seeing anything like this?
Thanks, --Bill